North Africa, Islam and the Mediterranean World: From the Almoravids to the Algerian War by Julia Clancy-Smith

Author:Julia Clancy-Smith [Clancy-Smith, Julia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, International Relations, General
ISBN: 9780714651705
Google: lqBp_AnrG34C
Goodreads: 977371
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2001-01-15T11:41:02+00:00

The Nineteenth Century: Urban Society in the Throes of Upheaval

To grasp the unique characteristics of urban society in the nineteenth century, it is necessary to take into account the double role of Tunis as both a Mediterranean port and an urban centre endowed with ancient cultural traditions, deeply embedded in the city’s fabric yet open at the same time to outside influences. But this era also constituted a critical stage in the city’s historical evolution culminating by the end of the century in its loss of independence. Thus this period compels us to isolate the most conspicuous aspects of change, including those occurring at the very core of urban society.

The political consequences of the 1815 Congress of Vienna became immediately apparent in European gunboat diplomacy. In 1816 an armed naval expedition led by the British admiral, Lord Exmouth, bombarded Tunis and other North African ports charged with corsair activity. This was followed by a rapid deterioration in commercial relations for the Maghribi states involved in the Mediterranean economy. As the external balance of trade shifted largely in favour of Europe, unfavourable internal economic conditions prevailed in the Regency of Tunis. During the first quarter of the nineteenth century, only two good harvests were recorded – in 1824 and 1826 – as drought repeatedly struck the country. A new fiscal system was instituted in 1819 in order to rectify grave imbalances in the central treasury; these fiscal measures, representing a dramatic modification in central government policy, affected the entire population.17

Furthermore, the plague of 1818 represented the end of the belle epoque as scarcity and famine threatened the city which may have lost a fifth of its population to the disease. Indeed, in 1819 the ruler Mahmud Bey (reigned 1814–24) had to take drastic measures to guarantee food to city dwellers by drawing on the grain reserves of the rabta.18 As the single largest consumer of agricultural products, the capital was gravely threatened by the twin crises of disease and famine; although producers in the countryside suffered even more and thus began a migratory flight from the villages of the interior toward coastal cities, particularly Tunis. Despite the ravages of epidemic; plague and later cholera, the capital paradoxically became overpopulated because the exodus from the interior offset demographic losses in Tunis. At the same time, a new migratory impulse from southern Europe and the Mediterranean islands brought to the Tunis region thousands of subsistence immigrants from Malta, Sicily and southern Italy19

By the middle of the century, Tunis appeared to reign supreme compared to the rest of the country which had suffered demographic devastation both in the villages and towns. With its population of more than 100,000 inhabitants, approximately 70,000 Muslims and 30,000 Jews and Christians, it displayed the characteristics of a cosmopolitan city which, however, had recently undergone a significant recession – and not a boom, a point that needs emphasising. This constituted therefore one of the fundamental differences between the development of Tunis and that of the port-city of Alexandria in

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